This was Ms Chen’s story: in 1962, age 14, she was already in what Dr Li terms the ‘cultural work troupe of the air force’. While she was helping herself to another plateful, my Chinese friend said, ‘We have names for women like her. There, at the Conrad Hotel, Ms Chen talked about herself, pausing occasionally as she slurped down a dozen or so oysters. Her Nanking accent was hard for me to follow so I invited a Chinese woman friend to accompany us to lunch. Ms Chen’s qipao, two sizes too small, was slit well up her thigh, revealing the suspenders at the top of her stocking. Now she was a plump woman in her fifties, squeezed into a scarlet qipao, the traditional tight dress slit up one side worn by much younger Chinese women. Could I find out from the British or the Americans if they would get her out?īy the time I met Ms Chen, then 57, she was no longer the pretty slip of a girl in the pictures she showed me of her in the Chinese air force singing and dancing troupe which had entertained Mao and his senior colleagues in the Chairman’s enclave in Beijing’s Forbidden City. He told me she was worried about what might happen to her when China took over Hong Kong on 1 July 1997. I was the East Asia editor of the Times, stationed in Hong Kong, when I was introduced to Ms Chen by Jin Zhong, the editor of Kaifang magazine, a journal devoted to politics across the border. Although at least one became pregnant, Dr Li knew that Mao was infertile he never revealed this to his patient. He continued, against Dr Li’s advice, to sleep with his numerous young partners, some of whom were described as his nurses. For years Dr Li listened to Mao boasting about his sexual practices and prowess he also treated the Great Helmsman for various venereal diseases. His consumption of young women, while he was married to Jiang Qing, one of the Gang of Four, was notorious, and became more so after the publication in 1994 of The Private Life of Chairman Mao, by Li Zhisui, Mao’s doctor. Ms Chen, the young woman with whom Mao began sleeping in 1962, was 14. And before he came to power in 1949, Mao often ordered the murder of those who challenged his ambitions within the Chinese Communist Party.īut a paedophile? Yes indeed. Mao the monster was already notorious: his lunatic policies had caused the world’s worst famine (1959–1961), in which 40 to 50 million Chinese starved to death he inspired the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), when a few million more died. In 1997 in Hong Kong one of Mao Zedong’s numerous sexual partners - in this case an underage one - told me her life story.
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